Review: Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim isn't a monster movie. Don't let the presence of giant man-made robots fighting gigantic hellbeasts fool you. What Guillermo del Toro has done with Pacific Rim is what no other filmmaker has done in the creature feature genre for decades – take a bona fide B-movie concept with a triple-A budget and make it matter. In just a few minutes of pre-credits back-story, del Toro paints a picture of a changed world that hangs in the balance: the arrival of 25,000 tonne monsters from another dimension, the cities that fell, humanity's response, the inevitable false dawn when we started winning. That neat set-up acts as a pre-bout bell ring, but when Jaeger eventually meets Kaiju on the Pacific Rim battlefield, it doesn't feel like a mere monster movie – it feels like a goddamn war film.